Interview with James D. Berry, Jr.* Conducted by Ronald C. Jessamy, Esq.** RJ: Tell us a bit about your background and what you did prior to your current position as Deputy Director of the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA) of the District of Columbia. JB: I was born in Washington. I grew up in northeastern D.C. in the 1960s. I am a product of DC Public Schools and graduated from Eastern High School in 1968. I was pretty good in high school and got a scholarship to Villanova University. My siblings and I were first generation colleagues in our family. I was 17 years old when I went to university and entered a very different world than the community I came from at the time. Like most people, my education has had a huge impact on my career plans and, most importantly, on my perspective on the city`s criminal justice system.
In the 1950s and early `60s, Carver Terrace of DC was then a close-knit community and had not yet been devastated by drugs. Most of us had intact family units, working parents from productive households. But between 1965 and 1968, things took a relatively drastic turn for the worse. That said, as the Vietnam War intensified, some of the young men I grew up with began to enlist in the army and found themselves in combat pretty quickly. Many of them returned from the war with heroin habits, and within a few years, drugs – mainly marijuana and heroin – found their way into the community. At the time, narcotics were so prevalent that every 10-year-old in the neighborhood knew where to buy heroin, and an increasing number of them became addicted over time. Not surprisingly, some of my contemporaries began engaging in criminal activity to support their drug use habits, and many ended up in prison in Lorton. Thus, my initial interest in criminal justice was shaped by the personal experience of seeing so many of my friends and neighbours come into contact with the criminal justice system and, as a result, change the direction of their lives immutably after the experience.
In particular, as a teenager, I did not understand why the men and women who entered our criminal justice system could not and should not expect them to get out of prison better than if they did. So I decided to work in the justice system and wanted to become a criminal defense lawyer. I graduated from Villanova University in 1972 with a degree in criminal justice and was immediately drafted, although, coincidentally, the design ended in November of that year. I trained as a military police officer and correctional specialist before being stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where I served as a watch commander at a palisade. At the age of 21, I was responsible for the entire operation of the high-security cell block during my shift. In the early 1970s, military service was an option offered to sentencing judges as an alternative to incarceration, so a number of men from my company joined the U.S. military as an extension of a distraction program. Most of the men housed in the fence were between 18 and 27 years old. More than 80% were there for an absence without permission (AWOL) or for a minor offence. It seemed both unusual and unfortunate to me. I began to wonder why people who often returned only a few days late after the approved vacation were immediately put on the ground upon their return and, in some cases, were drummed with less than honorable discharges from the military.
Again, the military justice process at the time seemed to be more focused on punishment and release than on retraining and reintegration into the armed forces, even for low-level offenders. When I was fired in 1975, I found a job as a program developer for the District of Columbia Public Defense Service through the CETA program [the comprehensive Employment and Training Act signed by President Richard Nixon in 1973 to educate and employ people in the public service]. There, I entered a graduate program at the University of the District of Columbia in counselling, and before I knew it, I had completed that program of study. As a program developer, my responsibilities included short- and long-term individual counselling of clients who had a wide range of social, emotional and other issues. I also developed memoranda in support of the conviction for presentation to the DC Superior Court and the U.S. District Court. And I have acted as an advocate for my clients in social service systems to facilitate entry into community programs as an alternative to incarceration. After a few years at PDS, around the time I finished graduate school, I essentially gave up my interest in law school. At the time, I felt that I could be more useful to those who had contact with our criminal justice system — like those with whom I grew up — at the back of the system than as a trial lawyer.
In my early years at PDS, the lion`s share of our clients had handled their cases through advocacy agreements. My work has therefore focused on developing other disposition solutions for consideration by the Court that had the potential to realistically help them repair and rebuild their lives. This challenge and career aspiration have become a passion for me. So I spent the next 25 years doing this work with literally thousands of clients. In 2000, I left pdS to join CSOSA`s Community Justice Programs Office. At the time, I was very active in the DC community as a Ward Advisory Officer, with the Federation of Civic Associations of DC, and with the Metropolitan Police Department`s Citizen Advisory Council process. So I was invited to come to CSOSA as a Community Relations Specialist to help the agency with other important tasks, among others, and to teach DC residents the importance of working with them to keep our community safe and give our supervisors a realistic chance to rehabilitate. This was at the time of the Bush administration`s sectarian initiative, which had prevailed in the judicial authorities, and it was a new approach to community justice. I thought at the time, as I do today, that CSOSA as an agency could have a significant and lasting impact on the thousands of people we oversee each year by working as hard as possible to maximize their chances of success. We did very important work in the community in the two years I served as a Community Relations Specialist, and I would have stayed there if I hadn`t been given the opportunity to return to DC`s Public Defender Service to do innovative work on its back-to-school initiatives and organize what later became the PDS Community Advocates Division.
In 2002, I returned to the PDS to lead three initiatives. The first was our Juvenile Services Program (JSP), which provided children with legal representation in disciplinary proceedings at the DC Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services` Secure Detention Center in Laurel, Maryland, and its Youth Services Center in Northeast DC. The JSP has also dealt with a variety of complaints and concerns raised by residents of these two facilities regarding their conditions of detention. The second initiative was called the Institutional Services Program (or Prisoners` Rights). ISP services were available to each of the DC Code offenders housed in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and those in a DC Department of Correctional Services correctional facility. As you know, DC criminals are sent to serve their sentences in the BOP system, and we were one of the few government agencies in the city where these prisoners could seek legal assistance if they had concerns about sentences that they felt had been miscalculated; their medical needs, which are not taken into account; allegations of staff abuse; and other issues related to the conditions of their captivity. It is important to note that the ISF also contacted those who returned to the city and supported them in addressing some reintegration needs. The third initiative of the Community Defenders Division addressed community reintegration issues and began sponsoring community reintegration and expungement summits to support people with criminal records.
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